Domesticity Isn't Pretty by Tim Barela review by Nayland Blake

Tim Barela refers to his comic strip Leonard and Larry as a "sitcom" and there is a lot to be said for that interpretation. The strip follows the lives of a gay couple in Los Angeles, and their extended family and friends. Quirky characters bounce in and out of the lives of the two heroes who remain, for all of their frazzledness, the moral and emotional center of story. It's a formula that Americans are familiar with, and Barela balances that familiarity against the more exotic elements in the strip.

Barela clearly loves the sitcom format, to the point of having some his characters drop references to "Our Miss Brooks" and "Ozzie and Harriet". Leonard and Larry's Los Angeles home serves as the main "set", and even Barela's point of view from panel to panel mimics the two camera set up of many sitcoms. His images are usually middle shots with a few establishing shots and very few close - ups.

Before Leonard and Larry Barela worked on a number of strips for various motorcycle magazines. This book gives you examples of these earlier efforts, as well as some samples of the strip's first manifestations. The strip originally started out as a standard four panel weekly, and the clearest influence on it is Gary Trudeau's Doonesbury . It's interesting to see these early strips, partially because Barela hadn't quite found the right format for the strip yet. Once he moved onto a more expansive full page format, he was freed up to introduce more characters and move his dialog past the rapid fire tic-tic-tic of the four panel format. Characters in Leonard and Larry rhapsodize, bicker, and fret at length, and much of the strip's charm is Barela's great ear for dialog. Listening in on these conversations week after week makes us feel at home with these people, to invest in their problems, to identify with them.

Barela's ear for dialog is matched by his eye for detail. Every panel is packed with carefully drawn, clearly envisioned bits of every day life. The characters mention a shop display that parodies Ronald Reagan in one strip and then pages later you get to see the display, discreetly placed in the background. It's the sort of thing that is not a big deal, but taken over time, these details accumulate and provide a surprisingly naturalistic grounding for the strip. Barela notices they ways his characters age, what happens when they redecorate, and the subtle distinctions between the social strata of Los Angelinos, and is able to draw them all. All of this detail makes Barela's forays into fantasy all the more effective.

The strip is filled with bearish eye candy as even the secondary characters like Leonard and Larry's respective brothers sport beards, moustaches and furry chests. (Bear celeb Lurch even makes a cameo appearance in the episodes involving the birth of Larry's granddaughter). While many of these strips appeared before the bear community really coalesced, it's surprising how many bear references jump out from the strip today. Indeed in some ways Leonard and Larry is a social history of the rise of "Bearishness" within the gay community. Howard Cruz's comic novel "Stuck Rubber Baby" is a self conscious attempt to create a panorama of gay social consciousness arising out of the civil rights movement. Leonard and Larry is a social history of gay lives, written and drawn on a different scale, but no less effective in its overall impact.

	Buy this and other Leonard & Larry books
	See Tim Shannon's review of the latest Leonard & Larry book
	Check out Ron Suresha's interview with Tim Barela
	Go to the official Leonard & Larry website
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